We would like to point out some features of the Scholar's Forum that are being
overlooked or misinterpreted.

1. The Forum does not propose establishing one generic "journal" for all
disciplines, or even a number of generic journals for different disciplines. It is a model
for conducting scholarly discourse, not the name of one server somewhere. Each element of
the Operational View flowchart stands for many such elements in practice, i.e. many
editorial boards, panels of copy-editing technical writers, groups of referees, technical
program committees, authors, and archives. The flowchart describes the relationships among
various parts of the model. Arrows indicate communication or discussion channels; dotted
lines indicate automated interaction with standards and protocols.

2. The preprint server is distinct from the archive. The Consortium makes a long-term
commitment to transfer reviewed works (final versions) to permanent archives, both paper
(for now) and electronic. It guarantees that as digital technology evolves, all electronic
works will be converted in a timely and high quality manner.

We are adamant in our belief that "self-archiving" to a single pre-print
server by authors when they submit a work is not building an archive. Archiving involves a
commitment to retain and maintain a work in a secure, systematic fashion beyond the
foreseeable future. The preprint server offers an author a venue for presenting a work
openly, without restrictions, and obviates the author's need to maintain a personal server
for this purpose. The Consortium will commit to providing on-going server maintenance and
further archival retention including making conversions to new formats as network
technology advances.

3. The purpose of the Forum is not to put established publishers out of business, nor
to generate a parallel universe to what already exists. We agree that scholars do not need
duplicative journals.

The Forum establishes a mechanism by which a society, group, conference committee, etc.
may process and post their collected works without having to develop an infrastructure of
their own. Once a standards and protocols platform is developed, it will be tested with
people who have no established journals of their own before it is opened to general use.

There is no reason the Forum cannot entertain proposals from established journals to
move their electronic collections onto Forum servers under the following important
conditions:

a.) The Consortium will not support any S/L/P terms from anyone for access to the
materials on the Consortium servers.

b.) To use a Forum server as its electronic distribution source, the publisher must
freely accept the terms agreed to by all parties to the Consortium.

c.) Authors or their institutions retain copyright per the terms established by the
Consortium (see the Model text).

4. The journal as a finite aggregation of vetted works will fade away. In its place,
the Forum offers a strong set of value-added alternatives:

Societies or other groups may create and disseminate coherent, accessible virtual
collections of links selected for their pertinence to members' interests. Thus, a society
may announce the availability of a work of particular interest to members but that may be
outside their usual focus or discipline.

In addition, this platform will enable individuals to establish their own subject
profiles to create personal alerting services.

5. The Forum provides flexibility to authors:

The Forum supports choice on how widely a work may be made available prior to
acceptance; authors may submit works directly to editorial boards or to conference
planners without first announcing their work in a preprint server.

Authors do not have to relinquish their right to submit papers to established journals;
the Forum represents one option for authors.

6. The Forum does not propose to change the peer review process. Peer review will
continue to be conducted within the disciplines by referees selected for their expertise
by their peers.

Editorial Boards will continue to be established just as today by the scientific
community, to serve the same critical needs. There may be an infinite number of such
boards, and they may be broadly based or highly specialized, depending solely on their
objectives and goals. They will continue to exercise exactly the same quality control
function as for today's journals and they may compete in areas in which the scholarly
community feels that competition is beneficial.

7. Copy-editing is a minor process. As Andrew Odlyzko recently pointed out, "The
manuscripts prepared by authors have been improving, to the point that copy editing....is
of diminished value."

However, editorial boards may demand that any author have a work copy-edited to meet its
quality standards. The Forum proposes that such copy-editing continues to be performed but
that the author becomes responsible.

The Forum proposes to eliminate the need for an editorial board to contract with or
become a publisher to accomplish copy-editing, by establishing lists of approved
consultants or services to whom an author may take a work that needs to be brought up to
the board's standards.

It is the prerogative of the editorial board to insist on receiving verification of
required copy-editing from its approved list prior to final acceptance of a work.

8. The new management of copy-editing illustrates a central advantage of the Forum
model: production cost is shifted from the reader/subscriber to the author/creator.
Authors are given meaningful incentive to improve their writing skills and to submit
quality copy at the outset which would certainly improve the lot of referees and editorial
boards!

9. While journal publication may take time to displace or reconfigure, conference
proceedings are expensive, limited publications that are difficult to access but contain
many valuable works. They may provide an ideal arena for initial experimentation.

Conference organizers will have the opportunity to distribute abstracts or preliminary
works prior to a conference without incurring the expense of printing and mailing, thus
reducing the costs associated with publicizing a conference.

The Forum also provides a mechanism for conference organizers to announce programs and
create indexes of submitted works. Full papers, reviewed or not, may be made available at
a later time with links to the original program and possibly with added commentary from
the conference itself. Refereed papers would be included in the archive, and could include
links to standing editorial boards in addition to the conference links.

10. The Forum proposes to develop a dynamic alternative to deadening email discourse
surrounding works in servers. By providing a hierarchical "threaded" discourse
platform, comments may be linked in a coherent and logical manner. Readers will have
access to the full discussion rather than to edited email commentary.

All prior comments will be available to each reader, in full, as submitted, without
requiring compilation or intermediation.

To facilitate this new mode of discussion, the Forum will develop the mechanisms to
support and retain linked commentary.

The author of a comment on a refereed work may also submit it directly to an appropriate
editorial board for review and possible inclusion in the archival record.

11. A well-designed index to the scholarly record assures that present and future
scholars may efficiently identify relevant work. Since the Forum's input protocols and
standards platform will permit the creation of a body of works that carry consistent
identification parameters, works may be sorted and retrieved by those parameters.
Consistent identification parameters counterbalance the limitations of hyperlink-only
retrieval or free text-only searching.

We submit that the Scholar's Forum, in its alpha-to-omega vision for advancing
scholarly communication, addresses for the first time in one coherent model the wide range
of needs and concerns of the academic and research community. The Scholar's Forum provides
a framework for experimentation to develop the next paradigm for scholar discourse.